Scotland Yard — the backdrop to thousands of crime stories and hundreds of film and television mysteries — is being converted into a £10,000-a-night luxury hotel.
The Grade II listed former headquarters of the Metropolitan Police is one of a number of iconic buildings being sold or leased by the Government as it seeks to cut spending. Other landmarks disposed of include Admiralty Arch.
Now the building from where the investigation into the Jack the Ripper murders was led has been taken over on a 125-year lease.
The man behind the hotel plan is the Cork-born head of the Galliard Group, Don O’Sullivan. “We want to create a world-class hotel attracting international visitors,” he said.
After a £100m refit, 3-5 Great Scotland Yard, inside which some of Britain’s greatest detectives worked and its most infamous criminals detained, will become a seven-storey, 235-bedroom hotel, complete with a spectacular grand entrance.
The market for top-end accommodation in London still has capacity, O’Sullivan believes, adding that just one-in-eight of the capital’s hotels built, or refurbished, since 2005 are five-star. Galliard is currently building three other hotels in the capital.
Founded in 1992 and employing over 700 staff, Galliard is a property development, hospitality and management group with a £1.1bn portfolio of 5,900 residential, hotel and commercial properties across London and southern England.
The streets around Whitehall are changing rapidly because of the new attitude by ministers to iconic properties, while vast foreign embassy buildings are being snapped up by wealthy individuals and foreign investment funds attempting to cash in on soaring property prices.
“The whole government quarter is undergoing a massive change,” says the Galliard Group managing director.
The red-brick and stone building was immortalised by Charles Dickens and later more popularly by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as the place where his famous detective visited Inspector Lestrade in countless Sherlock Holmes stories.
By chance, the Metropolitan Police is also planning to sell off New Scotland Yard the building it moved into in 1967 from its Victorian riverside headquarters. The force has been tasked by the London mayor with making savings of half-a-billion pounds by 2015 and selling its present headquarters could save £500m over the next two-and-half years.
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